Shakespeare, Plagiarist?

A page from the George

 North manuscript that

starts the poem about

Jack Cade. The last stanza

lists terms for dogs,

which Shakespeare used

in King Lear and Macbeth.

(New York Times)

In a field as deeply explored as textual studies of William Shakespeare's work, it might seem as there were little more to be said. But if you think that, you would be wrong, as independent scholar Dennis McCarthy demonstrated in conjunction with Professor Emerita June Schlueter of Lafayette College. In the forthcoming "A Brief Discourse of Rebellion and Rebels” by George North: A Newly Uncovered Manuscript Source for Shakespeare’s Plays (D.S. Brewer, an imprint of Boydell & Brewer, with the British Library), out next week, they discuss how they used WCopyfind software, which English, composition and other faculty members sometimes employ to find out whether students have committed plagiarism, to discover that the source of at least 11 of Shakespeare's plays, including several of his most famous, such as King Lear, Richard III, Henry V, and one of my favorites, the verbal and dramatic masterpiece Macbeth, was the eponymous tome by the obscure writer George North.

According to Michael Blanding's New York Times report, McCarthy does not believe that Shakespeare actually plagiarized North's unpublished work, which he somehow acquired, but as was the case with other sources of his borrowings, North's text served as a crucial guide and source, down to words deployed in the exact same order, but repurposed in style and often, it seems, meaning.  A self-taught Shakespearean and magazine journalist, McCarthy was inspired both by the idea of evolutionary development, which he had already written about, and practically by former ETH Zurich Professor Sir Brian Vickers' use of similar software in 2009 to establish that Shakespeare had co-written Edward III. McCarthy began sussing out the sources of Shakespeare's work, and followed that led him to George North's volume. Next, the Times notes

To make sure North and Shakespeare weren’t using common sources, Mr. McCarthy ran phrases through the database Early English Books Online, which contains 17 million pages from nearly every work published in English between 1473 and 1700. He found that almost no other works contained the same words in passages of the same length. Some words are especially rare; “trundle-tail” appears in only one other work before 1623.

In the past, some scholars have identified sources for Shakespeare from a few unique words. In 1977, for example, Kenneth Muir made the case that Shakespeare used a particular translation of a book of Latin stories for “The Merchant of Venice” based on the word “insculpt.” In recent years, however, it’s become rare to identify new sources for Shakespeare. “The field has been picked over so carefully,” [former University of Chicago Professor David] Bevington said.

I would add that back in 2013, I blogged about Saul Frampton's assertion that the Renaissance scholar and translation John Florio not only edited Shakespeare's works, but enriched them linguistically, adding to the Bard of Avon's already rich trove of innovative language. I found his argument quite convincing, and when I have taught the foundational course in literary studies, it is one of the essays I share and discuss with students.

Before Florio got to Shakespeare, though, Shakespeare was gleaning all kinds of gems from North, and polishing them up, McCarthy and Schlueter will suggest in their study. In the Times article, McCarthy points out how North's preface contains a unique series of terms, many familiar to us today--"proportion," "glass," "feature," "fair," etc.--to urge those who seem themselves as unattractive instead to create an inner beauty, against the stamp of nature; as it turns out, Shakespeare uses the exact set of words, in the same order, to make a different statement in the opening soliloquy of one of his unforgettable villains, the hunchbacked and unloved Richard III. What McCarthy and Schlueter divined was that this is not a one-off case; Shakespeare repeatedly not only borrowed exact terms from North, but also employed in similar series and scenes, as well as similar figures from history.

For example, in Macbeth, Shakespeare has his protagonist declaim,

"Ay, in the catalogue ye go for men;
As hounds and greyhounds, mongrels, spaniels, curs,
Shoughs, water-rugs and demi-wolves, are clept
All by the name of dogs (Macbeth, III, 1)

In King Lear, Edgar says:

Tom will throw his head at them. Avaunt, you curs!
Be thy mouth or black or white,
Tooth that poisons if it bite;
Mastiff, grey-hound, mongrel grim,
Hound or spaniel, brach or lym,
Or bobtail tike or trundle-tail,
Tom will make them weep and wail:
For, with throwing thus my head,
Dogs leap the hatch, and all are fled. (King Lear, III, 6)

This list, McCarthy and Schlueter argue, is almost a mirror of North's text, with the ultra-rare "trundle-tail" a term appearing only in the source text, Shakespeare's play and one other early 17th century text. The playwright spins these borrowings out into something memorable in both plays. In another example, the reference to Merlin's speech in King Lear diverges from any previously known prophecy by the wizard, yet McCarthy and Schlueter found a version of Merlin's speech in North's text, and that it not only influenced what Shakespeare later wrote, but also the figure of the "Fool," who delivers it.

In Henry V, McCarthy finds many correspondences, as Quartzy demonstrates in the following chart:

 

According to reports, including one in Atlas Obscura, scholars have praised McCarthy and Schlueter's work, and it suggests that digital humanities scholars and students looking at texts might do well to utilize all the software at hand, including a tool often used to catch potential miscreants, to learn even more about the roots of key works of the past. Mr. McCarthy, it appears, certain intends to do so. His book hits bookshelves this Friday, February 16.

Who Edited Shakespeare?

William Shakespeare

As every writer knows, there is nothing like a great editor. Even for the most talented among us. Including William Shakespeare. Debates continue about who exactly Shakespeare was, and whether or not he or someone else wrote his plays and poems. I stand on the side of those who attribute most of the words and work to the Bard of Avon--and the actors who were involved in performing and shaping his plays as a result--and not any of the other people whose names have been bandied about as the actual authors. But a question still remains: when William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories and Tragedies, also known as the First Folio, appeared in 1623, seven years after Shakespeare's death, someone, or several people, had to have edited it, and the given what we know about the two figures whose names are attached to it, John Hemminges and Henry Condell, it's unlikely that they had the knowledge, time or dedication to do so. So who edited Shakespeare?

Here's where an attentive eye and close reading, and the possibilities enabled by the digital humanities come into play. In The Guardian, author Saul Frampton guides us through his argument, eventually to be a book, that a certain John Florio (1553-1625) probably unknown to all but the most assiduous scholars of the English Renaissance and literary world, not only was the likely editor of Shakespeare's First Folio, but in some cases revised and rewrote Shakespeare's plays. Not being a Shakespearean scholar, Frampton's argument sounds like a big deal to me, but perhaps it is old knowledge among people in that field. (I checked, and it turns out that there have been arguments that Florio's father, Michelangelo Florio, wrote Shakespeare's plays, or that Florio may have written them completely by himself; his role as editor has been less discussed.) What Frampton recounts, and how he goes about his argument, I continue to find utterly persuasive and enthralling.

John Florio

The short is that Frampton, like many a scholar and reader before him, compared the First Folio with some of the extant quartos of Shakespeare's plays, and noticed differences between them, chiefly in terms of form standardization in the later compendium, but especially in terms of linguistic differences. I recall enough from my study of Shakespeare to remember this particular argument, which I also recall leading to discussions of whether Shakespeare, the players, some other very learned figure or some combo of all of the preceding wrote the plays or not. Digitization of the quartos, however, makes such comparisons much easier. What digitization has also made easier is comparison to other works during the same period, and the occurrence and frequency of certain words in Shakespeare's oeuvre as well as in the work of his contemporaries. What Frampton has found--if I am reading the article right, and this is his finding, or his synthesis of others' findings--is that a number of words that appear in the Folio do not appear elsewhere in Shakespeare's work, but they do appear, with great frequency in the writings of John Florio, who very well may have been figured, in various ways, in several of Shakespeare's works.

Who was Florio? Born in England eleven years before Shakespeare, and the son of an Italian Protestant immigrant (of Jewish religious ancestry) who fled back to Italy during the brief Catholic Restoration under Queen Mary I, Florio returned to his native country in the 1570s and made his mark, Frampton says, as a scholar, lexicographer and translator. His books included several landmark language treatises, First Fruits of 1578 and Second Fruits of 1591, a 1590 edited version of Sir Philip Sidney's Arcadia, and his career-making translations, the Essays of Montaigne in 1603 and Bocaccio's Decameron in 1620, as well as two major English-Italian dictionaries. His prodigiousness extends to the level of language itself: third only to Chaucer and Shakespeare, Florio, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, is the source of 1,224 first usages in written English, including such still-used words as "judicious," "management," "transcription," "masturbation" and "fucker." Yes, "management"!

Moreover, he had links to Isaac Jaggard and Edward Blount, the First Folio's printers, who each had printed several of his works. The First Folio's dedicatees, William and Philip Herbert, also had links to Florio all the way back to his father's era. Frampton points out that Florio, given his learned and literary background, deep knowledge of publishing, and links to both men, was an obvious choice as editor. He also knew William Shakespeare as well, and what's unclear to Frampton is whether the two men had beef, and whether Shakespeare was not mocking Florio in several of his characters, including not just Osric in Hamlet, but in Malvolio and Shylock (because, as I noted, Florio's father had Jewish ancestors). Frampton adds that scholar Jonathan Bate argues that the infamous "Dark Lady" of one-third of Shakespeare's sonnets may have been Florio's wife. By the time Shakespeare died, Florio was sailing through economically constrained straits, having not received a promised pension, and editing Shakespeare and further strengthening ties to the wealthy Herberts would have been to his advantage in more ways than one.

But this sounds like so much fascinating but circumstantial speculation. Where Frampton really begins to prove his supposition is when he goes to the texts themselves, and begins pointing out how the linguistically inventive Florio's diction and terms, found in his own texts, start to pop in the Folio versions of texts where it had not existed in the older quarto versions or anywhere else in Shakespeare's or even his major peers' works. Let me quote him directly:

If we look at Hamlet, for instance, we notice that the editor of the Folio introduces a number of unusual words to the text. Thus in Act 1 scene 5, Hamlet instructs his sinews to bear him "swiftly up" to revenge. The Folio changes the quarto's "swiftly" to "stiffely", a word never used elsewhere by Shakespeare but familiar to Florio, who uses it four times. In Act 5 scene 2, "breed" is changed to "beauy" (bevy), again a word never used elsewhere by Shakespeare but which Florio uses three times. And the same can be said of a number of unusual additions to the play – words such as "pratlings", "checking", "detecting", "quicknesse", "diddest", "daintier", "hurling" and "roaming". In Act 2 scene 2, Polonius tells how Hamlet was "repell'd" (rejected) by Ophelia. The Folio changes "repell'd" to "repulsed", the latter a familiar word now, but one never used elsewhere by Shakespeare, or Marlowe or Jonson. But such a substitution would occur naturally to Florio, who uses "repulsed" four times, defining the Italian Ripulso as "repulsed, repelled".

This pattern continues throughout the Folio, in Henry V, where the word "demonstrated" in the quarto version becomes "demonstrative" in the Folio, a word that not only Shakespeare, but neither Marlowe or Jonson used either, but which Florio used 20 times in his own work; or in Henry IV, Part One, the quarto's "intemperance" becomes the Folio's "intemperature," again a word Shakespeare (or Marlowe or Jonson) never used anywhere else, but which Florio uses in his work. Another strange coincidence involves the statement in Henry IV, Part Two, that the King entered "on the Tarras," which Frampton notes Shakespeare have never used before nor ever again anywhere in his work, but which appears 13 times in Florio's translation of The Decameron. The pattern continues in other Folio plays, both in terms of changes that favor Florio's lexicon, as well as rare words--"longly," "mothy," "queasines"--that appear not infrequently in Florio's writings, as well as some that appear only there, such as "enfoldings" and "swaruer" ("swarver"?).

There are also instances where the editor expands and supplements Shakespeare's language, plumping it out rhetorically, making inferences more obvious, as in King Lear, where Frampton shows someone at work drawing out Shakespeare's thought(s), creating not just amplitude but a richer and more emphatic statement (the words in italics are the Folio additions), as in this statement by Gloucester, in Act 1, Sc. 2:

In Cities, mutinies, Countries, discord; in Pallaces, Treason; and the Bond crack'd, 'twixt Sonne and Father. This villaine of mine comes vnder the prediction; there's Son against Father, the King fals from byas of Nature, there's Father against Childe. We haue seene the best of our time. Machinations, hollownesse, treacherie, and all ruinous disorders follow vs disquietly to our Graues. Find out this Villain, Edmond, it shall lose thee nothing …

The original version relies on blank verse, as well as several rhetorical devices, including rhyme, parallelism and hysteron proteron, and the extreme concision of asyndeton and ellipsis to convey Gloucester's quick insight. The Folio editor, however, creates prose, adds, repeats and clarifies what must be worked at in the quarto original, giving himself away, Frampton notes, by some of the words that, as I have said before, appear nowhere else in Shakespeare but do pop up in Florio's own work. Frampton's insight may also explain the fact that Gonzalo's vision in The Tempest has long been known to have been lifted straight out of Florio's own translation of Montaigne's essay "Of Cannibals", but the borrowing was thought to have been Shakespeare's. It very well now might be viewed as Florio having added his own work, which is to say, his and Montaigne's, to that of the master dramatist.

Then there is Frampton's query, which also is explosive assertion: that Florio may have removed or edited a reference to himself in Hamlet, but also might have done so with other Shakespearean plays as well. This leads Frampton to note that given how little we know--and lacking the kinds of powerful search tools now available many generations of Shakespearean scholars, though they have discussed Florio in various ways, appear to have overlooked the profound role he played--it may remain unclear just how extensive a role he played not just in editing, but writing and rewriting Shakespeare's "ragged written copy." Alongside this, there might have been particular motivations for Florio's effort: in addition to having the lines of a character, the clown Feste, correct the grammar and spelling in a letter he quotes that was written about Malvolio, the putative stand-in for Florio, a letter he neither heard read aloud nor repeated. In the play, however, Malvolio gets the last word(s), and, Frampton implies, they very well may have been Florio's guiding point: "Ile be reueng'd on the whole packe of you."

I often say I plan to read works I blog about, and I do try to do so whenever I can, but I can assure any reader here that as soon as I can get my hands on Frampton's study, I will. Until then, here's to Shakespeare, Florio, Frampton, dramaturgy, scholarship, literary study, reading, the digital humanities, and linguistic invention!

11+ Things I'll Miss About Chicago

22 boxes and counting

When I first sojourned in Chicago for the spring 2001 quarter, and then returned again to teach and live in fall 2002, people would ask me, Do you like it t/here?  Even before I ever lived here I visited many times, and believe without hesitation that Chicago is a great city, one of the grandest, most exciting and livable big cities in the US. But I would often find myself giving a mixed answer, because there were and are many things I like about it, but there are things I have not liked so much.

A few years in, Chicagoans no longer asked me the question, assuming I suppose that I was still here I must like it as much as they did, but people who came to visit or people I met in other cities who found out that I spent part of each year here would ask me about the city, and almost always whether I liked it. Again my usual response usually proceeded with praise for the city's many amenities, which I would then counter with a statement about the winter. This sufficed, because almost everyone I've come across has an image of Chicago's glamorous downtown skyline (which has grown only more impressive in the years since I've been here), yet shudders with fear over having to spend a winter alongside this side of Lake Michigan, especially after the Snowpocalypse (which really did blow snow through my locked window sashes up onto the inner panes of my apartment's double-paned windows), though as a colleague reminded me yesterday, this was a very mild winter.

Over the last few months I have been thinking of what things I really have enjoyed about Chicago and what I'll miss, and what I have enjoyed less so. Here then are two lists, which do not include my family, friends, students and colleagues (who'd appear in the first).

TEN THINGS I'LL MISS ABOUT CHICAGO

1. My neighborhood, Rogers Park. It's one of the most diverse and affordable neighborhoods on Chicago's north side, quite safe (even though one of the main strips was for years an open-air, 24/7/365 illicit drug mart that cops drove past without batting an eye), full of artists and immigrants and queer folks and people of all ages, colors and religions (I used to live near an Episcopalian Church, Ethiopian church, a Korean Christian church, and a mysterious African-derived church that held ceremonies all weekend long, it seemed, and now live right across the street from a Christian Science outpost), with an accessible beach, lots of cut-rate but tasty restaurants, and proximity to Evanston, which has meant a fairly easy commute to work. The El's and Metra's trains both stopped in the neighborhood. Getting downtown is always a hike, and necessitated my getting a car when I had to teach on the Chicago campus, but there's also a lot to be said for not being in the midst of everything, or being in the midst of other sorts of things that are amenable and livable. That Rogers Park is.

2. The various literary and artistic communities of Chicago. Rarely do they meet, but I have tremendously enjoyed interacting with and in some cases participating in many of them. Alongside my university creative writing, Poetry and Poetics Colloquium, and literary studies colleagues and students, I've had the invaluable benefit of linking up to a range of smart and energizing wordsmiths, artists and performers. From the Reconstructon Room and Second Sun and the Silver Room, who brought visual art, poetry and performance together, to the Red Rover Series, which never failed to bring something innovative and unexpected to its events, to the Human Micropoem, which put the "p" in "people," "poetry," "politics," and "possibility," to the Homolatte series at Big Chicks, which paired queer performers and music in exciting ways, to the Myopic Reading Series at that incomparable bookstore (cf. below), to the Danny's Reading Series, which brought so many friends to town and gave a whole new meaning to reading in bar full of enthusiastic patrons, to the Poetry Foundation and its multiple, enlightening programs, to the Gwendolyn Brooks Conferences at Chicago State University, which I had the good fortunate to be able to speak at and attend, meeting Dr. Haki Madhubuti, James Alan McPherson, Edward P. Jones, and the late Octavia Butler, among many others, to all the projects that Krista, Toni, Nathanaël, Abegunde, Jen, Erin, Amy, Joshua, John, Jennifer, Quraysh, Kelly, and Reg, and a vast extended crew of other writers and artists and programs have gotten going, I never lacked for language and art.

3. WBEZ, Chicago's main public radio station. Though it relies perhaps far too heavily on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation for programming--on any given day, if I switch on WBEZ, half the time, it seems, I hear Canadian accents talking about Canadian topics, which is okay in small doses, fond as I am of our neighbor to the north--WBEZ is far superior to WNYC in New York. Unlike the latter station, it has a more racially and ethnically diversified local lineup of reporters and hosts, and far more diversified programming. It also featured one of the smartest, most informative programs I've ever heard, Odyssey, hosted by Gretchen Helfrich. That show has gone and Helfrich is in (or has finished) graduate school, but it alone made WBEZ worth listening to every weekday. Also, it broadcasts weekly speeches from the Commonwealth Club of California; features a show called Vocalo that plays house music for hours on end; and yet also features all the NPR staples, including Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me, Prairie Home Companion, Car Talk with Tom and Ray Magliozzi. Fortunately I can stream it online, so I won't have to forgo it, but I'd much rather be able to tune all my radios to it rather than the New York metro-area dominant WNYC.

4. Metropolis Café, Charmers Café, Caribou Coffee's branches along Clark Street, The Common Cup, Chava Café, and all the great cafés from Rogers Park to Boystown to Wicker Park. I am a coffee person and a café person, and Chicago has many of the latter serving very good cups of the former. Metropolis has excellent coffee, and I've enjoyed sometimes running into favorite colleagues hard at work there, and even met a talented Afro-Colombian artist who'd exhibited his work there.  Charmers is very neighborhoody, and I once stumbled upon a film being shot there. At the various branches of Caribou I have graded many a paper or reread a short story or novella revision; unfortunately I've also always managed to miss Rod 2.0! When we're both in town we seem to operate like two subatomic particles that settle at the exact other Caribou at the same time.

5. Landmark Century Cinema, the Music Box, Gene Siskel Film Center, and all the other venues for seeing new and unusual films, and alongside the theaters, all of Chicago's vaunted film festivals, which are the real thing. The city has tons, you can see films you'd only see on the coasts, and most of them are affordable. There's even a mainstream theater in walking distance from me, right near the Loyola University of Chicago campus, that features very cheap matinees.

6. Lots of cheap, affordable, delicious restaurants. I have mostly cooked since living here, but I can vouch for the fact that Chicago has some of the best food in the US, high, middle and low end, and if you are looking to economize, it also has a number of excellent fairly affordable restaurants, with almost every cuisine you could think of available.  A few years ago one of my students visited the famed Alinea, a temple of molecular gastronomy, and I have said I'd love to try it, but it remains out of my price range. One restaurant I don't hit anymore but which is a must for meat lovers is Hot Doug's, about which I'll say only: bring cash, be ready to stand on line, and don't eat before because you will certainly feel full. There are variations on Mexican cuisine that boggle the mind. Then there's my favorite restaurant, Sticky Rice, a joint serving Northern Thai cuisine that has "worms" on its menu. Chicago does roll like that!

7. More theaters and plays staged than you can possibly ever visit. I'm not a big theater person, but I think Chicagoland has got New York and LA beat by many miles in this regard, Broadway notwithstanding. This is a theater town. On any given night, there are plays underway somewhere in Chicagoland. Or on the verge of being staged. I have caught some great plays and performances, and some awful ones, but without fail I've at least left the theater musing about what I saw.  Within walking distance of my apartment there are, right now, a staging of works by Samuel Beckett and A Light in the Piazza, just to name two of the offerings.

8. The El. Once I was able to avoid having to rely on it all the time, I could appreciate it.  Some of the stations, like nearby Jarvis, look so decrepit it's miracle they're still standing, the cost of a one-way ride just keeps rising, and the hub-and-spoke format means that getting west requires you to travel towards the Loop to connect to lines radiating away from the Lake, but it runs 24 hours, and mostly goes where I need to if I don't want to drive. Getting to Cablevision, the office of the Secretary of State (for car stickers, etc.), requires another mode of transportation, however. I.e., a car.  (I'll put in a plug for the No. 22 bus, which runs up Clark Street. It's reliable and clean and carries all manner of humanity up and down this major east-lying Chicago artery.

9. Chicago is one of the more queer-friendly cities in the US. I have had many criticisms of former mayor Richard Daley, but being homophobic was never one of them. Between the city's government and its general ethos, it is pretty lgbtq-friendly, and although there are racial, ethnic, class, and gender divisions among lgbtq people, the main gay neighborhoods of Boystown and Andersonville (there are others, including Rogers Park) are increasingly gentrified and unaffordable to many non-wealthy queer people, and there is anti-gay violence like anywhere else, Chicago has maintained a vibrant queer ecology in a way that other cities, either through hypergentrification or decline, have not. Outside the northside it's less gay-friendly, but there are gay bars and events on the South Side and West Side, and the general atmosphere places it in the upper ranks of major US cities.

10. Bookstores like Unabridged Books, Myopic Books, Women and Children First, Powell's, and many others. I am packing up books, so many books, so many boxes of books, which is a tiny nightmare, but Chicago still has some fine independent and used bookstores, some offering treasures that astonished me. Like the time, early on in my process of working on this 19th century novel, of coming across a book, in a bookstore, and not a library, on African-American probate records in Boston. Seriously. There it was, right there in the used bookstore. Or going to another bookstore not far from Wrigley Field and seeing first editions for sale for less than $50.  Or finding the Encyclopedia Africana for $20 years ago, a price so low I decide to buy two, and, at the urging of an acquaintance, shipped one to a Brazilian writer who would have had to pay through the pores to get a copy. I have tried to the best of my ability to visit these dens of text-lust infrequently as my departure date has neared, but I know I will miss all of them.

11. Chicago's architecture. I don't just mean the famous architectural treasures, of which there are many, but the Prairie and Arts and Craft-style homes, the solidity of the brick architecture, the human scale of so much of the northside's neighborhoods. Then there are the numerous remarkable exemplars by some of America's greatest architects (H.H. Richardson, Holabird and Roche, Burnham and Root, William LeBaron Jenney, Sullivan and Adler, Walter Burley Griffin, Mies van der Rohe, Frank Lloyd Wright, Helmut Jahn, Stanley Tigerman, Skidmore Owings & Merrill, etc.) dotting Chicagoland , and singular jewels like the Marina Tower (the Honeycomb Building), which never fails to fill me with awe and delight. I've never understood why I enjoy looking at and exploring buildings so much, but Chicago has presented more than enough.

Also, all the museums; the parks and conservancies, with their incredible floral displays; the fact that I was able to be here on the very day in November 2008 when Barack Obama was elected President of the United States, four years after I'd met and spoken with him in Evanston; the affordable rents, even in Rogers Park; my local health food coop, which is excellent; the easy drive to O'Hare International Airport; the beach in spring and fall; and driving toward downtown on Lake Shore Drive in the evening during the fall and winter, when the Loop's skyline gleams in front of you, and off to the left you can see the glittering bracelet of Navy Pier's Ferris Wheel turning, the shimmering moonlit lake churning in the background. It evokes a feeling that isn't exactly romantic but approximates it. If nothing else, it underlines Chicago's distinctive beauty and  I always expect to see this in a film, but never have. Directors, please take note.

Chicago Staged Reading: Roussel's Dust of Suns

It's been a while since I've posted (including missing my 6th blogaversary--I'll finish that post soon), but when I haven't been traveling I've buried under paper this quarter, with no let up for the next few weeks.  Between my classes, all the great undergraduate and graduate students whose work I'm supervising, and a committee I served on (whose work is now done), I haven't had much time to breathe.

I did, however, happily agree to participate last winter in the wonderful event below, the Chicago Poetry Project's staged reading of French author Raymond Roussel's (1877-1933) strange and enchanting 1926 effort Dust of Suns (La Poussière de soleil), one of his several failed efforts at the art of the stage. I say failed, because like nearly all of Roussel's work, this play was a bust at its premiere, yet his strange methods of composition, involving homonymic play, have stood up well over the decades, and like his (failed) poetic and novelistic projects now show him to have been ahead or at least in the more interesting currents of his time.

Chicago-based poet, critic and sage John Beer is mounting and directing the production, which will take place at the eerily named Charnel House, on West Fullerton in the Logan Square neighborhood (it's 3-4 blocks from the Blue Line El stop nearby), over the next three days. It's free, so if you happen to find yourself with a few hours, a desire to laugh (the play is often quite funny), and even the slightest interest in seeing yours truly in an eyepatch and cape, please do come see it.

The Chicago Poetry Project presents
a staged reading of the play
  

Raymond Roussel's The Dust of Suns

Created By
John Beer

March 4-6; Fri, Sat 8pm; Sun 3pm. ALL PERFORMANCES ARE FREE.

Location
The Charnel House
3421 W. Fullerton St., 773.871.9046

About Roussel and the play:

French poet, novelist and playwright Raymond Roussel (1877-1933) faced almost universal incomprehension and derision during his lifetime, for works that neglected traditional character and plot development in favor of the construction of elaborate descriptions and anecdotes based on hidden wordplay. While the premieres of his self-financed plays caused near-riots, admirers included Surrealists Andre Breton and Robert Desnos, who called The Dust of Suns (1926) “another incursion into the unknown which you alone are exploring.” Roussel never enjoyed the posthumous fame of his hero Jules Verne, but he has exercised a powerful fascination upon later writers and artists including the French Oulipo group, Marcel Duchamp, John Ashbery, Michel Foucault, and Michael Palmer. New editions of his novels and poetry are forthcoming this year from Princeton and Dalkey Archive.

Like much of Roussel’s writing, The Dust of Suns has a colonial setting. Against the backdrop of fin-de-siecle French Guiana, a convoluted treasure hunt unfolds. Along the way, Roussel fully indulges his penchant for bizarre invention and juxtaposition. The Frenchman Blache seeks his uncle’s inheritance: a cache of gems whose location lies at the end of a chain of clues that includes a sonnet engraved on a skull and the recollections of an albino shepherdess. Meanwhile, his daughter Solange is in love with Jacques—but all Jacques knows of his parentage is a mysterious tattoo on his shoulder...

This script-in-hand performance of Roussel’s play, directed by John Beer, with design by Caroline Picard, features an array of Chicago writers and artists.

Performers include: James Tadd Alcox, Joshua Corey, Joel Craig, Monica Fambrough, Sara Gothard, Judith Goldman, Samantha Irby, Lisa Janssen, Jennifer Karmin, Jamie Kazay, John Keene, Jacob Knabb, Francesco Levato, Brian Nemtusak, Travis Nichols, Jacob Saenz, Larry Sawyer, Suzanne Scanlon, Jennifer Steele and Nicole Wilson.

My iPad drawing of John Beer at rehearsal

New Year?...Hey, It's January 8th!

For once this does feel to me like a new year. A new and very extremely busy year already (sigh), but fresh all the same. It was wonderful to be home with C for a little bit, and to get away for a hot minute too. (Besotes siempre a Anthony M.) But I did post a New Year's message, and I experienced no airline horrors getting back to Chicago, despite all the grim O'Hare flight news that besieged the holidays and holiday travelers, and so a correspondent wondered where I've been since, and I meant to reply to her as I did to a graduate student that I'm in the "mines" right now, so no or only a little posting.

It's a metaphor I didn't think of several years ago when a younger writer asked what my quarters usually consisted of, but this ought to give some sense of what's up: winter quarter classes have begun (I have two, one an undergraduate introductory creative writing class, one an upper level undergraduate class in literary theory, about which I'll write more soon). I am also supervising the honors theses of 2 undergraduate students (one working on a literary study, one writing a fiction manuscript), the MA/MFA theses of 2-5 students, the doctoral dissertation of one student, and a independent study project of at least 1 undergraduate student. (I hope I haven't forgotten anyone!) And then there's the committee and departmental activities of which I cannot say more. The quarter's over in March. I'm going to try to post a bit more than once per week, but the entries may be thin gruel indeed, and it's not for lack of intent or interest....

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Congratulations to CCer Aracelis Girmay, who won the 2009 Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award for her superb book of poems, Teeth (Curbstone Press)!

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Today's RedEye (the free, dumbed-down, picture-heavy version of the Chicago Tribune) has on its all-black cover (wink, wink) the question "Is Racism Dead?" Because our 44th president is a black person, you know. (Please do note the images shown in the "Stories" list.)

Why don't we ask him, or him, or him, or them? And those are just the spectacular examples....

(And how could we ever forget this character, who'd like to fill Hillary Clinton's seat. "The Democrats are throwing the election away. And for what? An inadequate black male....Well, I got news for you, McCain will be the next president of the United States!": famous last words, Ms. Christian, famous last words.)

And then there are these buffoons! (And if you're looking for Facebook friends, wackpot and W enabler Ken Blackwell bragged today that he has more Facebook friends than the other contenders. Have you missed out on being part of his online posse?)

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Police have arrested the quartet of Latino and Black men who brutally gang-raped a 28-year old Black woman in Richmond, California, on December 13, 2008, because of her sexual orientation. A Facebook group, "Help a Sista Out," has been established here.

If you would like to offer some financial support to her, her partner, and her daughter, you can do so here:

Community Violence Solutions
2101 Van Ness Ave.,
San Pablo, CA 94806
Attn: Mrs. Joanne Douglas

If you would like to send a sympathy card, you may do so here:

Richmond Police Department
Attn: Sgt. Brian Dickerson
1701 Regatta Blvd.
Richmond, CA 94804

I hadn't seen this very on-point post by Professor Melissa Harris-Lacewell, one of Princeton's many brilliant lights, but it's definitely worth reading! (H/t to WOC PhD) I haven't seen Milk yet, but then I also didn't get to Noah's Arc: Jumping the Broom when it was in Chicago for an eyeblink. The DVD will be out in February, I believe I saw in this past week's Windy City Times, so I plan to see it as soon as I can.

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The Israel-Hamas War continues, with a new front possibly opening up as of yesterday. The United States is uniquely placed to bring it to a cease-fire. We all know this. If you have not contacted your Senator(s), Congresspeople and the President-Elect and Vice President-Elect, demanding that they do so, please do so now.

While you're politely but firmly demanding they push for a cease-fire, please also let them know that letting all of the people who engaged in warrantless spying on Americans, who organized and authorized torture, extraordinary renditions, and secret prisons, and who kept Guantánamo in business deserve to be brought before a Truth and Reconciliation Commission at the very least, and prosecuted for War Crimes at best. They really should hear this as often as they can. As should our new president, Barack Obama, who appears poised to go the Clintonian route and sweep all the prior crimes under the rug in an effort to "move forward."

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Speaking Obama, Illinois, and the junior Senate seat shenanigans, I found myself mentioning Blagojevich in reference to the concept of "tragedy" in my first afternoon class this past Tuesday, which got me to wondering how four major playwrights--William Shakespeare, George Bernard Shaw, August Wilson, and Adrienne Kennedy--would explore the circumstances of his rise (he was elected not only twice to the governorship, but also to Congress in the seat Rahm Emanuel just gave up) and fall.

If I can offer some very potted thoughts, I think Shakespeare would focus on the fatal flaws in Blagojevich's character, and the colorful context and cast that surrounds him. His estranged father-in-law, Alderman Dick Mell, would certainly be a character as would Patrick Fitzgerald and Lisa Madigan. And then there's the ghost of Richard Nixon, whom a young Blago was quite enamored of. (Shouldn't some intrepid reporter have pointed that out to voters before the first election?) Shakespeare probably also would have made much punning on Blago's Kennedyesque affectations; delusions, hubris, grandiosity and denial; and hair. How many allusions to hair do you think Shakespeare would have come up with? Ten? Twenty? Fifty? When speaking before the legislature or to constituents, or when soliloquizing, he would speak in poetry, but in best Shakespearean fashion, when speaking on those tapes, we'd get pure prose (and some clever vulgarities too). The Avon Bard would probably also condense and distill the story so that we got the highlights and lowlights, but in a way quite different from the temporal compressions of contemporary dramas. I think the ghost of Nixon would factor into these. Would it end with impeachment, or just with Blago being marched out of his house by police?

Shaw would probably focus on the malign influence of money, Blago's working-class background, and his desire for greatness fatally undercut by his lack of good faith. I can see one scene including Blago's very public and vocal denunciation of the ever-growing bemoth Bank of America at the Republic Windows and Doors Factory sit-in followed by his very public and shocking arrest right thereafter. One of the key elements of Shaw's treatment would, like Shakespeare's, be the monologues each character delivered. Shaw's Blago would probably have a more gilded tongue than the real governor, and almost convince us spectators of his virtue, just as he conned a majority of Illinois voters before his re-election, despite the fact that the festering pustules of corruption that were eventually to burst would be evident to anyone listening to and watching carefully what was unfolding on the stage. Another key element would be comedy, caustic but effective in getting us to see some absurdity at the base of the tragedy before us. I'm not so sure how Shaw might end the play, except to say that we would probably have a bit more sympathy for Blago, which makes me think that the Burris legerdemain would factor in. Now admit it, didn't you have to give Blago props for his audaciousness in pulling this mess off?

August Wilson would probably also include a ghost, but not Nixon. His ghost might be Martin Luther King Jr., and his focus might be on either Jesse Jackson Jr., who can give a good speech, or Roland Burris, whose ego is Shakespearean, to put it mildly. Barack Obama would certainly be part of this cast. Two of Wilson's greatest strengths as a playwright are his compelling poetry and his gift for encapsulating an epoch in a few gestures, conversations, several acts, so I think if he were to focus on Jackson Jr., we might see a contrast between the dreams and actions of his father and the Civil Rights era, and the contemporary moment, when even a Black person can be as corrupt and connected a player as anyone else. He also might give us some of the hidden family drama unfolding among the Jackson clan: imagine the exchanges Wilson could come up with between Jesse Jackson Sr.; Jesse Jr.; brother Jonathan Jackson, who's allegedly linked to the Blago Senate seat selloff; Jesse Jr.'s wife Sandi, a Chicago City Councilperson; and mother Jacqueline Jackson. If the men ended up wrestling on the floor, while uttering unforgettable lines, would you be surprised? How would Wilson end the play? With Jesse Jr. alone in his Chicago office, watching a TV set on which Burris was being sworn in as Obama stood by (poetic license, you know)?

Adrienne Kennedy, the only one of the playwrights I've invoked who's still alive and writing, would have a field day with this story if she took it up. I could see parallel narratives, one with Blago being sworn in as president of the US, the other of him in jail, telling the story. He might even be represented by various personalities/selves, designated by grotesque masks or grotesquely made up actors, including one who was actually a version of Richard Nixon, one a version of John F. Kennedy, another Richard J. Daley. Or one might be, in outlandish and brilliant Kennedy fashion, a major, tragic female figure from history, like Queen Anne of Great Britain, or Joan of Arc. Given Blago's strong support among Black Chicagoans, one self might be Jean Baptiste Point du Sable! All of them would end up cleverly mixing snippets of Blago's speeches with their own (or invented) words, all undercut by the Blago-in-jail narrator, who would assure us that in fact, the true outcome was that he was elected President, far in the future. I would particularly look forward to the final speech or portion that unraveled or complicated the delusional stance of the governor, and the revelation that the nondescript office was, in effect a jail cell. Kennedy could certainly pull it off.